Manually loaded furnaces for burning wood and other solid combustible matter have been known and used for many years. Generally these furnaces comprise a chamber for holding the combustible matter and for radiating the heat produced therefrom, as well as an access door for adding combustible material to the chamber and means for exhausting the products of combustion.
Numerous ornamental and utilitarian changes have been made in these furnaces over the years. For example, some manually fed furnaces burning wood and other solid combustible materials have been fitted with automatic stoking devices. In many applications, the advent of ready supplies of natural gas and fuel oil has eliminated the use of both manually fed and automatically stoked furnaces burning solid combustible matter altogether.
Nevertheless, manually fed furnaces burning wood and other solid combustible matter still have an important role to play. These furnaces can be used to produce heat from renewable resources like wood or combustible trash. Properly designed furnaces can operate for twelve hours or longer on a single load of solid combustible material, thus making automatic stoking unnecessary.
While it cannot be denied that manually loaded furnaces burning wood and other solid combustible material are environmentally desirable and practical in many applications, those using these furnaces do experience some inconvenience. In particular, one opening an access door to a furnace already containing a burning combustible material will be met by a gust of smoke and other combustion by-products. The loading of combustible material into the furnace chamber itself is often awkward and backbreaking. Removal of spent combustible material from its supporting grate within the furnace chamber is a messy chore.
While the prior art has failed to overcome these problems, the present invention represents an important contribution to the art by providing useful, novel solutions.